Tuesday, November 22, 2005

People can believe whatever they want, but I just wanted to address something for those of us in the reality-based community. Among Althouse's baseless claims is that the only reason this site gets any traffic is because all of the commenters keep reloading the page and then rushing off to the comments section. Of course, the comments don't impact traffic, one doesn't have to reload the page to get to the comments section, and only a tiny minority of readers actually participate in the comments section.

It's certainly the case that no internet traffic stats program is perfect. Sitemeter, the one used by most bloggers, claims to record "visitors" using a method which excludes people who reload the page within an hour. One can also look at page views, which sitemeter does also, or unique visitors which extreme tracking does. None of these are perfect, but presumably they get roughly in the ballpark of the right answer.

I felt the need to respond because I do like to make a few bucks off this site so I can feed the cats and since Althouse is apparently trying to discourage advertisers by writing things like:

Thus, I see his high traffic as rather bogus. And it's bad for advertisers who rely on the number, because visitors aren't staying on the page with the ads, but going onto the comments window, which doesn't have ads.

Anyway, according to extreme tracking The site had 188,886 views yesterday. About 21.5% of those were reloads, and about 78.5%, or 148224, were unique. According to sitemeter it was about 225K of the former and 200K "visits" as it measures them. Blogads lists me at about a million page views for the week.

In any case Althouse is entitled to her pet theories about the value of internet real estate, but those are the facts.